Bredolab Botnet Creator Gets 4 Years in Jail

Russian citizen Georgy Avanesov was recently given a four-year prison sentence in Armenia for creating and distributing the Bredolab malware.

"Avanesov was arrested in October 2010 at Zvartnots airport in Yerevan, Armenia, a day after the Dutch High Tech Crime Unit disrupted the Bredolab botnet and seized 143 servers that were used to control it," writes ITworld's Lucian Constantin. "The Bredolab botnet was primarily used to send spam emails and launch DDoS attacks. The Dutch authorities estimated that over 30 million computers had been infected with the malware."

"One of the key features of the Bredolab botnet was the closely repeating cycle the botnet used to build up its zombie networks, in which infected computers subsequently infected websites, which in turn infected new victim computers," Infosecurity reports.

"According to prosecutors, Avanesov developed Bredolab in Armenia around March 2009 and used computer servers in Holland and France to spread the virus," writes Wired's Kim Zetter. "They say he earned about $125,000 a month renting out access to compromised computers in his botnet so that criminals could use them to spread other malware, send out spam, or use them to conduct distributed denial-of-service attacks."

"The criminal income allowed the hacker to live a pretty lavish lifestyle by all reports, as he jetted off to the Seychelles with his attractive girlfriend and fancied himself as a DJ," writes Sophos' Graham Cluley. "At its peak, it is estimated that Avanesov's botnet was spewing out over 3 billion infected emails every day."

"The 27-year-old is the first person in Armenia to be jailed for violation of Armenia's computer crime laws," writes The Register's John Leyden.